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Thursday, 5 May 2016

Can “My Little Pony”, a Yugoslavian living in the Netherlands,
and modern Bulgarian literature have something in common? Let’s see if I can
start with the Yugoslav living in the Netherlands, move through an animated
children’s television program, and travel through a novel shortlisted for the
Best Translated Book Award. Enter my labyrinth, let’s hope there’s not too many
dead ends.

In our contemporary society – which is highly homogenized by the global
marketplace – intellectual and artistic heresy is like oxygen. Globalized
culture sucks that oxygen from our mental landscape. The global marketplace
pretends that it offers us a diversity of products but in fact sells us the
powerful substitute of the holy ONE. Today, we get one “subversive” philosopher, one
“subversive” artist, and one
subversive “writer”: the global market can’t bare more than one! In other
words, we get one Coca-Cola, but we
believe that by consuming it we consume the whole world. Celebs are our modern
prophets, whether they sell the photos of their impressive posteriors, like Kim
Kardashian, or the seductive theories, like Slavoj Žižek, or millions of their
books, like Haruki Murakami. I don’t have anything against Kim Kardashian or,
God forbid, against the great Slavoj Žižek, or my fellow writer Haruki
Murakami, but the holy ONE policy (created, ultimately, by consumers
themselves) is a quite obvious sign of a society homogenizing its tastes and
needs. That’s why many cultural “species” (forms, patterns, genres, practices,
ideas, and cultural spaces) are disappearing. The global market standardizes
our tastes, our intellectual and cultural needs. In the result, we all read one book, one Bible, one Koran, we all
follow one “prophet”; we all wait in
long lines to buy a new book by one
writer, or in line to see the exhibition of one artist. There is a market pressure to love Him, to buy Him, and as we
live in a religious world, we like to establish our modern “prophets” (in
visual art, the entertainment industry, literature, film, etc.). And then we
like them and respect them because everybody else likes and respects them…

Taken from “A Conversation with Dubravka
Ugrešić” by Daniel Medin.

Published in “Music & Literature” Number
6

Given the history of the Minotaur in literature, you would
think another work using the mythological beast as a metaphor would fit the
contemporary society overflow. A writer with limited coverage in the English
speaking world would not fit the profile of a “modern prophet”.

Not every reader has studied Classical Greek Mythology, and
I’m fairly confident children watching “My Little Pony” and coming across a
character called “Iron Will”, half bull, half pony, who puts on an
“assertiveness” seminar in a hedge maze would have no idea of the references.

For those interested in seeking out the “My Little Pony”
reference it is season 2, episode 19 “Putting Your Hoof Down”, written by long
term SpongeBob Square pants writer Merriwether Williams (credited with 47
episodes of SpongeBob) from a story by Charlotte Fullerton. A full stream of
the “My Little Pony” episode is available on line. In the episode, besides a
Minotaur in a hedge maze we have Fluttershy pony becoming ashamed of her newly
learned assertiveness and being locked in a dark room. When pressed by other
polite ponies about her behaviour she yells; “Iron Will is not a monster, he’s
a MINOTAUR.”

In the basement of the palace in Crete, Daedalus built a labyrinth of
such confounding galleries that once you went inside it you could never find
the exit again. Minos locked up his family’s shame, his wife Pasiphaē’s son, in
this underground labyrinth. She conceived this son by a bull send by the god
Poseidon. The Minotaur – a monster with a human body and a bull’s head. Every
nine years the Athenians were forced to send seven maidens and seven youths to
be devoured by him. Then the hero Theseus appeared, who decided to kill the
Minotaur. Without her father’s knowledge, Ariadne gave Theseus a sharp sword
and a ball of string. He tied the string to the entrance and set off down the
endless corridors to hunt the Minotaur. He walked and walked until he suddenly
heard a terrible roar – the monster was rushing toward him with its enormous
horns. A frightful battle ensued. Finally, Theseus grabbed the Minotaur by the
horns and plunged his sharp sword into his chest. The monster slumped to the
ground and Theseus dragged him all the way back to the entrance.

-Ancient
Greek Myths and Legends

Georgi Gospodinov’s book “The Physics of Sorrow” sides with
the fate of the Minotaur, he argues that he is merely a victim, he had no
choice in being born and banished to the underground, he had to eat, and he was
trapped in a labyrinth. Why do the majority of references identify the Minotaur
as a monster?

As well as the Minotaur, the labyrinth has also featured
heavily in popular culture and not just in literature, in fact there have been
thesis’ written on the subject of labyrinths and literature, one I found
on-line quoting Umberto Eco, (of course Ovid), Friedrich Nietzsche, Jorge Luis
Borges, on the opening pages. I’m not even going to address the labyrinth and
popular culture…video games, maze runners, it’s endless.

“No one realised that the book and the labyrinth were one and the same.” Victor Pelevin

But Georgi Gospodinov’s work is so much more than a design
around the labyrinth motif and the Minotaur as a metaphor. A collection of
short personalised views, vignettes, stories, rambling paragraphs, it is a work
not easily defined, the deciphering is akin to solving a cryptic crossword, but
the resultant challenge and enlightenment, once you find your way through his
labyrinth of dead ends, is a very rewarding journey indeed.

Opening with a “prologue” defining seven versions of “I”
(1913, 1968, always, never, not yet, 1944 and enduring nature) noting the
“seven” definitions, the number of victims sent to the Minotaur, and the
specific years, two preceding the two world wars and the other the year
Bulgarian forces participated in the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia. Later in the novel you will also learn of
other important references to the relative years, or time periods. Each and
every page contains a wealth of information that may be worth researching, or
it may be just a contribution to Gospodinov’s collection of junk, a dead end in
the labyrinth.

Once you get a little deeper into the book you discover that
the narrator is in fact Georgi Gospodinov himself and we find that he has the
ability to inhabit other people’s memories, the stories of his family, his
friendships, at times the tales are written in the first-person, at other times
in the third person.

I write in the first person to
make sure that I’m still alive.

I write in the third person to
make sure that I’m not just a projection of my own self, that I’m
three-dimensional and have a body. Sometimes I nudge a glass and note with
satisfaction that it falls and breaks. So I do still exist and cause
consequences.

This family structure is a labyrinth itself, he inhabits his
grandfather’s experiences, who was accidentally left behind at the flour mill,
during World War One, as a three-year-old. We have the same grandfather
visiting the fair, again alone, with a “fiver” which he uses to visit a
Minotaur “there is sorrow in him, which no animal possesses.”

Just as the Minotaur is abandoned, has no childhood, lives
in sorrow, this is a “novel” that explores human abandonment, the absence of
childhood, and of course, as the title suggests, sorrow, the reader is led
through the deep caverns (labyrinth) of the author’s mind. There are numerous
times and experiences divulged, we have the exploration of growing up in
Communist Bulgaria, the boredom, the absence of children, the television
programs (propaganda), the training, even the sexual awakening in a repressed
society. We have the author himself being exiled, or is it somebody he
inhabits?

Let’s wait here for the souls of
distracted readers. Somebody could have gotten lost in the corridors of these
different times. Did everyone come back from the war? How about from the fair
in 1925? Let’s hope we didn’t forget anyone at the mill. So where shall we set
out for now? Writers shouldn’t ask such questions, but as the most hesitant and
unsure among them, I’ll take that liberty. Shall we turn toward the story of
the father, or continue on ahead, which in this case is backward, toward the
Minotaur of childhood…I can’t offer a linear story, because no labyrinth and no
story is ever linear. Are we all here? Off we go again.

Later in the novel Gospodinov becomes a purveyor of stories,
within these stories he can create a childhood, he can reject abandonment, a
true storyteller is one who can inhabit another’s thoughts. The labyrinth
becomes less dark.

“The Physics of Sorrow” is littered with quotable quotes,
philosophical observations about our planet, our very beings, as you read them
you wonder, ‘is this another dead end to the labyrinth?’, however, as a whole
the collection comes to a crescendo, the final clues of the cryptic puzzle fall
into place, the fact that this is indeed a rare gem comes to the fore. Yes it
may be a rough unpolished gem in places, that doesn’t mean it is any less
precious.

There is also a hilarious, but true, section on the banality
of the question “How are you?” and the phobia our writer has for being asked
such, a listing of the clichéd replies, a la ‘fine thanks’, ‘hanging in there’,
‘getting by’ and a further listing of the available answers to the question. My
personal favourite from the list is “I’m not”.

Experimental in style, moving through myth, fact, fiction,
meta-fiction, philosophy, photographs (there are some included as well as
artworks) and even noises, this is not a book for those who want a
straightforward narrative style. Given the limited media coverage for this
work, although being shortlisted for the Best Translated Book Award will help,
this wonderful book risks being another victim of our “homogenized contemporary
society”. To me a work which explores the limits of fiction, another
“subversive” writer I am glad the Best Translated Book Award has introduced me
to.

Who knows, maybe one
day there will no longer be Literature. Instead there will be literary web
sites. Like those stars, still shining but long dead, the web sites will
testify to the existence of past writers. There will be quotes, fragments of
texts, which prove that there used to be complete texts once. Instead of
readers there will be cyber space travelers who will stumble upon the websites
by chance and stop for a moment to gaze at them. How they will read them? Like
hieroglyphs? As we read the instructions for a dishwasher today? Or like
remnants of a strange communication that meant something in the past, and was
called Literature?